Audible Pasts: History, Sound and Human Experience in Southeast Asia1

KEMANUSIAAN Vol. 25, Supp. 1, (2018), 1–19 Audible Pasts: History, Sound and Human Experience in Southeast Asia1 BARBARA WATSON ANDAYA Asian Studies Program, University of Hawai‘i, 1890 East West Road, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822, USA [email protected] Published online: 20 December 2018 To cite this article: Andaya, B.W. 2018. Audible pasts: History, sound and human experience in Southeast Asia. KEMANUSIAAN the Asian Journal of Humanities 25(Supp. 1): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.21315/kajh2018.25.s1.1 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.21315/kajh2018.25.s1.1 Abstract. Although historians of traditional Southeast Asian cultures rely primarily on written sources, the societies they study were intensely oral and aural. Research on sound in Southeast Asia has focused on music and musicology, but historians are now considering the wide variety of noises to which people were exposed, and how the interpretations and understanding of these sounds shaped human experience. This article uses an 1899 court case in Singapore concerning a noisy neighbour as a departure point to consider some of the ways in which “noise” was heard in traditional Southeast Asian societies. Focusing on Singapore, it shows that European attitudes influenced the attitudes of the colonial administration towards loud noise, especially in the streets. By the late 19th century, the view that sleep was necessary for good health, and that noise interfered with sleep, was well established. The changing soundscape of Singapore in the early 20th century led to increasing middle class demands for government action to limit urban noise, although these were largely ineffective. The regulations and public campaigns introduced over the last 60 years still face the problem of intrusive noise, both in the public and private domain. The richness of the Singapore material, only some of which has been consulted for this paper, suggests that the Southeast Asian region has the potential to make a significant contribution to the field of sensory history. Keywords and phrases: ethnicity, nervous anxiety, noise abatement, sensory history, Singapore Introduction In April 1899, a Singapore paper reported a court case involving a certain Mr. Zuzarte and Mrs. Rosa Sternberg. Mr. Zuzarte, whose name indicates he was of Portuguese descent, had been living in #174 Middle Road for around 32 years. © Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2018. This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 2 Barbara Watson Andaya The adjoining terrace house, #173, was rented by Mrs. Sternberg, who had originally opened an ice-cream and confectionary shop. However, this had not been profitable, and the previous year she had therefore started a bakery business. The baking began late at night and continued until early morning. Mr. Zuzarte brought his case to court because, he alleged, the battering, jarring, thumping and scraping noises caused by the beating of dough and the slamming of oven doors was so loud that he could not sleep. In sum, he argued that Mrs. Sternberg was making so much noise that it not only lowered the value of his property but was a fundamental impediment to the “quiet and peaceful” enjoyment of his home. Two supporters, brought in to testify on Mr. Zuzarte’s behalf, said they too were unable to sleep and that the noise was “jarring” on the nerves (Straits Telegraph and Daily Advertiser 22 April 1899, 3). In her defence, Mrs. Sternberg claimed that the noise from her bakery was “trifling and was not sufficient to wake a sleeping child”. She kneaded her dough in a trough, not on a table, and used a knife to slip the rolls into the oven. Her neighbour on the other side, a Chinese man, said that he had lived there for six years and he was had not bothered by noise when the bakery began operating. However, the defence lawyer’s argument that Mr. Zuzarte had exaggerated the affair, that reaction to noise is relative and that “the ticking of a clock would keep many people awake, whereas the five o’clock gun fired at Fort Canning, which is enough to wake the dead from their grave, does not at all disturb the soldiers” failed to sway the chief justice (Straits Telegraph and Daily Advertiser 22 April 1899, 3). Two days later he granted an injunction and awarded costs in favour of the plaintiff (Straits Telegraph and Daily Advertiser 25 April 1899, 3). This scenario, not unfamiliar to modern apartment-dwellers, raises four issues that have provided a basis for this paper. In the first place, it is a reminder that the growing field of sensory history can be a useful way of thinking about the past, especially in non-Western societies. In the second place, this ruling occurred against a colonial background in which European suspicion of public noise was heightened by ethnic and class divisions. Third, the verdict in Zuzarte vs. Sternberg reflects a growing Western view that sleep was necessary to prevent nervous anxiety and that the law should intervene to protect individuals and the public from unacceptable noise that interfered with rest. Finally, the influence of the noise abatement movement that garnered so much international support in the first decades of the 20th century was also evident in Singapore. The legal ruling in the case of Zuzarte vs. Sternberg can thus be approached as an example of attitudes that anticipated the anti-noise regulations now embedded in Singapore’s management of urban life. Audible Pasts in Southeast Asia 3 Auditory History and the Southeast Asian Past In recent years the expanding field of auditory history has opened up new ways of thinking about the oral and aural environment that characterised much of the premodern world, including Southeast Asia. In urging us to “listen to the past”, scholars working on aural history have stressed that the field itself is young and that “the history of listening, sound and noise outside of the United States and Europe begs for detailed attention and investigation” (Smith 2004, x). Yet, reconstructing the environment in which sound operated and the reactions to the acoustic context is not an easy task. Although a sneeze or a clap of thunder may “sound” more or less the same today as they did 200 or 300 years ago, we do not now hear them as our forebears did. Most societies no longer regard thunder as the voice of the heavens, nor see a sneeze as some kind of omen, since the development of scientific knowledge has changed the way we react to the auditory world. Cultural contexts, too, can radically alter the ways in which sounds are heard. Ancient Greeks, for instance, regarded a sneeze as a good omen, whereas in many other cultures it serves as a warning of uncertain but imminent danger; for the Ibans of Borneo it was thus a sign that no hunting should take place that day (Hastings, Selbie and Gray 1917, 398; Lumhultz 1991, 199). In other words, attitudes and beliefs about sounds can differ cross-culturally, and have changed over time. While many such beliefs have been lost, or can only be partially recovered, even those that have retained acoustic permanency no longer inform the lives of people in today’s world, including most Southeast Asians. In the Malay Peninsular, men collecting gaharu wood in the jungle would once listen for what they described as a whispering in the trees, which would show that the tree contained the infected but fragrant heartwood, just as the sound of a cicada would indicate the presented of a camphor tree (Skeat 1967, 210). One would be hard pressed to find individuals with such acute hearing in contemporary Malaysia. While listening to the quiet communication of jungle trees required particular sensitivity, no such requirement was attached to high volume levels, which could be heard by an entire community. Most of the premodern world, including Europe, believed that loud noises could have a force of their own that could even be life- threatening, especially when they occurred unexpectedly. As various historians have shown, a conviction that the booming sound of thunder represented the cosmic voice of an immensely powerful supernatural agency was widespread (Rath 2003, 11, 56). In Southeast Asian societies, the perception of thunder as supernatural speech alerting the community to the perpetration of some immoral act or some portending disaster has a long history, and has even been discerned in the distant origins of Austronesian and Oceanic languages (Blust 1981). In historical times, one of the earliest references comes from the Vietnamese dynastic chronicles, 4 Barbara Watson Andaya which record that an 11th-century king “would shake with fright at thunderclaps”, but similar reactions have also been described by modern ethnologists (Nguyen 1995, 111; Schebesta 1929; Roseman 1991, 137, 146). Infants were thought to be particularly vulnerable to loud and sudden noises; in 1886 the Malay author of a letter to a Singapore newspaper said that one Chinese man he knew had lost three children because they had been so frightened by the firing of the Fort Canning gun (Roseman 1991, 27; Sempang 1886, 1). On the other hand, predictable sounds produced by humans, especially in community activities – laughter, cheering and shouting – were generally regarded positively, even when extremely loud. The emergence of the new field of sensory history is an exciting development for historians of non-Western cultures because it encourages the researcher to approach sources with fresh questions that can often yield unexpected but illuminating responses. Although ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have drawn our attention to the significance of sound in contemporary Southeast Asia, the region’s auditory past has only recently attracted attention from historians (Andaya 2011; McCallum 2017; Raja Iskandar 2018; McCallum, forthcoming).

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